Welcome to GraniteGrok 2.0! - Granite Grok

Welcome to GraniteGrok 2.0!

We opened the doors on GraniteGrok five years ago now – right near the “end of the beginning” part of time when the blogosphere really started to take off in popularity.  At the time, when Doug and I agreed to start the site, I looked around for the most scalable and flexible platform I could and settled on Moveable Type 3.35.  We customized it, learned some of its ins and outs, and it stood us in good stead for its time and its design capabilities.

Well, during the last year, it became clear that its shortcomings were becoming too long in the tooth to ignore.  With almost 10,000 posts the Search had started to crawl, the back-end area in which we write our posts and do normal SysAdmin stuff was really behind the times; it was almost impossible to to keep up with “the latest and greatest” in social media….you get the picture.  I will tell you, though, letting go of the old site was hard to do (given all the work I did over the years on it), but the other Groksters convinced me (er, near to a mutiny???) it was time.  So we started in.

Since Carolyn McKinney of Perceptions Studios had done such a great job for us on the banner that we use at events and the bookmarks we hand out (for real books), I asked her to do a prototype redesign; what you see now is a collaboration with Carolyn and all the writers at the ‘Grok.  And it is a collaborative design we had not yet planned to launch….

…but on 12/1, the old backend for ‘Grok 1.0 decided it was time to show its version of the Y2K bug and it stopped allowing us to do new posts.  That was the alarm to scoot to the new site, and that’s kept us busy for the last couple of days—to get it to “Go Live.”   And I thank Carolyn and the Nexcess folks (our hosting company) for all their hard work, AND the patience shown by the other Groksters in doing this well before we really were ready.  Sure, there will be burps and “uh-oh’s” during the next couple of days, but we “flew the plane”.

Hopefully, you like what you see – let us know!

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